[OLPC-devel] Booting from uncleanly dismounted flash key.

[Ronald G Minnich]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 22:44 -0400, Jim Gettys wrote:
> 
>>If you have an ext3 image on a flash key and boot via LinuxBIOS, the
>>boot fails, and you get dropped into a shell.  fsck -p of the flash key,
>>and everything is fine again.
>>
>>Is there some way to fix this?  This feels very fragile to me. 
> 
> 
> Just to be clear: this is _expected_ behaviour. Ext3 is
> backward-compatible with ext2 _if_ it's mounted uncleanly and the
> journal is clear. If there are writes outstanding in the journal then it
> is not compatible with ext2. Thus the refusal to mount, with an error
> message about incompatible features.
> 

ext2 is doing the right thing. Our boot scripts need a little cleaner 
boot technique.

ron